Showing papers by "Theodoros Marinis published in 2017"

Language impairment in bilingual children : State of the art 2017

Abstract: Several migration waves within the past two decades have led to an increase in the number of children worldwide who start (pre)school in a language that is not their home language. While teachers can often tell that a monolingual child’s language is not as expected for her age and speech and language therapists can successfully identify language impairment in monolingual children, this is far from obvious when the language they evaluate is the child’s second language (L2). This was brought into the spotlight especially by Johanne Paradis and colleagues in the first decade of the 21st century (Paradis, 2005, 2007, 2010; Paradis, Crago, & Genesee, 2005/2006). Numerous studies (e.g., Bedore & Peña, 2008) have documented how bilingual children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) are overor underrepresented in speech-language therapy caseloads. Overand under-representation of bilingual children with SLI occurs because bilingual children’s language trajectory differs from that of monolingual children, and therefore, monolingual norms cannot be used for bilingual children. Moreover, bilingual children’s language trajectory is modulated by environmental factors over and above those relevant to monolingual children, e.g., onset and exposure to the two languages, quantity/quality of input, and status of the language pair (minority/majority), that lead to greater individual variability than in monolingual children. In addition, bilinguals should be assessed in both languages, but only a small number of language assessments have versions in more than one language. These are normed with monolingual children, and therefore, the norms cannot be used with bilingual children. Thus, all in all, there is a lack of standardised bilingual language assessments. This has important implications for differential diagnosis by speech and language therapists and decisions for early remediation. The issue of overand under-representation of bilingual children with SLI hit a nerve. It instigated interest across the globe and led to the funding of several

Early Language Learning: The Impact of Teaching and Teacher Factors

Abstract: This study examined the progress in lexical and grammatical knowledge among 252 learners of French in England across the last two years of primary education and into the first year of secondary school in relation to teaching and teacher factors. It compared linguistic outcomes from two different approaches, one which emphasized oracy and the other which combined literacy with attention to oracy development. We also explored the relationship between linguistic outcomes and other teaching/teacher factors: teaching time, teacher level of French proficiency, and teacher level of training in language instruction. Learners completed a sentence repetition task and a photo description task, making small but statistically significant progress in both grammatical and lexical knowledge between test points. While teaching approach had little impact on such progress, other teaching and teacher factors did, particularly the French proficiency level of the primary school teacher and the amount of teaching time devoted to French.

An fMRI study on the processing of long-distance wh-movement in a second language

Abstract: Recent behavioural evidence from second language (L2) learners has suggested native-like processing of syntactic structures, such as long-distance wh-dependencies in L2. The underlying processes are still largely debated, while the available neuroimaging evidence has been restricted to native (L1) processing. Here we test highly proficient L2 learners of English in an fMRI experiment incorporating a sentence reading task with long-distance wh-dependencies, including abstract syntactic categories (empty traces of wh-movement). Our results suggest that long-distance wh-dependencies impose increased working memory (WM) demands, compared to control sentences of equal length, demonstrated as increased activation of the superior and middle temporal gyri bilaterally. Additionally, our results suggest abstract syntactic processing by the most immersed L2 learners, manifested as comparable left temporal activity for sentences with wh-traces and sentences with no wh-movement. These findings are discussed against current theoretical proposals about L2 syntactic processing.

Decision-making capacity in aphasia: SLT’s contribution in England

Abstract: Background: Individuals’ right to be involved with decisions regarding their health and social care is the cornerstone for modern patient-centred care. Decision-making is a complex process ...

On-line processing of English which-questions by children and adults: a visual world paradigm study.

Abstract: Previous research has shown that children demonstrate similar sentence processing reflexes to those observed in adults, but they have difficulties revising an erroneous initial interpretation when they process garden-path sentences, passives, and wh-questions. We used the visual-world paradigm to examine children's use of syntactic and non-syntactic information to resolve syntactic ambiguity by extending our understanding of number features as a cue for interpretation to which-subject and which-object questions. We compared children's and adults' eye-movements to understand how this information shapes children's commitment to and revision of possible interpretations of these questions. The results showed that English-speaking adults and children both exhibit an initial preference to interpret an object-which question as a subject question. While adults quickly override this preference, children take significantly longer, showing an overall processing difficulty for object questions. Crucially, their recovery from an initially erroneous interpretation is speeded when disambiguating number agreement features are present.

Object Clitics in the Narratives of High-Functioning Children with Autism

Abstract: When an entity in the discourse has a prominent status, speakers tend to refer to it with an underspecified expression, such as a pronoun. In the theoretical literature this has been captured by Heim 1982 in her Prominence Condition, and see Arnold (2008) and Arnold et al. (2009) for psycholinguistic literature on the topic. Using a pronoun, therefore, requires pragmatic judgements about what is prominent, as well as the ability to take into account the perspective of the listener. It is not surprising, therefore, that young children often fail on tasks that involve these processes and use pronouns without clear antecedents (Hendricks et al. 2014, Wigglesworth 1997). It is well-agreed upon that people with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) have pragmatic difficulties, regardless the reasons to which these have been attributed (see Marinis et al. 2013, for a recent review). As a consequence, one of the topics that have been investigated the most in the related literature is the use of pronouns in the discourse of people with ASD. Although the findings do not always coincide, there seems to be a consensus that individuals with ASD differ from their typically developing (TD) controls in their use of pronouns in some way or another. 1 Thus, in some studies, the difference is more dramatic, since it lies in the fact that individuals with ASD make use of a smaller amount of felicitous pronouns, namely, of pronouns with a clear referent (Norbury & Bishop 2009; Novogrodsky 2013; Novogrodsky & Edelson 2015). In other